Smoke and mirrors: Antony Gormley’s new Blind Light installation at the Hayward Gallery, London. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images
Does it matter if art is good or bad? The art of Antony Gormley forces this question. Arrive in Newcastle train station and a massive poster image of The Angel of the North, advertising the local paper, confronts you: walk around the buzzing city centre and icons of Gormley’s colossus are everywhere. It’s obvious Newcastle has taken this sculpture to heart. If you’re growing up in the city it must be a noble part of your education, telling you that art is big and important, inculcating a respect for culture that used to be sadly absent from British life. I grew up in an industrial town in north Wales and if there had been something in the area like Gormley’s Merseyside beach installation, I know it would have meant a lot. So to that extent good for him, and the Merseyside piece made me start to understand why he has so many admirers.
But in Newcastle, after being impressed by all the images of the Angel, I was confronted by the real thing and it’s still as bad as it was the last time I looked. In contemporary art it has to compete with, say, Richard Serra’s abstract steel: by comparison Gormley’s use of steel is curiously weightless. That big rectangular wing is fixed so flatly to the body. There’s no interesting relationship between form and content, material and structure. It’s like a political speech with no core of conviction and does the kind of violence to art that politics does to language. To paraphrase George Orwell this not modern art but newart.
Britain has a dubious tradition of producing artists who seem to express the ideas of their time, yet who look a bit ridiculous after the rhetoric moves on: Joshua Reynolds, Rossetti, most of all Henry Moore. I think the most generous thing a critic can honestly say about Gormley is that he’s this century’s Moore. If Gormley really is modern Britain’s idea of a provocative, serious artist we haven’t changed much. We’re as remote from the cutting edge as Britons in the 1950s who took Moore, that third-rate imitator of Picasso, to be an important modernist.
I’m genuinely glad that works like The Angel of the North exist to make British cities more friendly to art and more sympathetic to the imagination. What I hope, though, is that a teenager growing up in the Angel’s shadow goes on to create art that has everything it lacks.